In the old days, they called it “keeping up with the Joneses.”
In Bushwick, it’s become a matter of keeping up with the hipsters. The ones with trust funds, that is. When it comes to finding an affordable place to live, the charge is that the hipster haves are squeezing out the hipster have-nots.
The flash point of the complaint is a luxury rental complex called CastleBraid at 114 Trautman. Its Web site says it’s not “just an apartment building” but a world “custom-built to enable the artist.”
That’s fine for those who can afford its rents. But artists of more modest means — or without wealthy mommies and daddies to help them pay the rent — say the silver-spooned hipsters are just making the whole area more expensive to live in.
“It’s like an adult children playground,” Angelina Dreem, a yoga teacher and four-year Bushwick resident, told The Post. “They’re all, like, subsidized.”
That may be. But in fairness to the residents of CastleBraid, we would only point out they didn’t create the market distortions that are making it expensive for everyone else — including non-artists — to find a decent place to live at a reasonable price. So while the higher rents charged at CastleBraid may be helping to raise prices in the neighborhood, they are more a symptom than a cause.
The biggest driver of New York City’s high prices for rent is an artificially tight market courtesy of rent control and rent stabilization. When you effectively take half the city’s apartments off the market, it means the entire demand has to be satisfied by the other half. In short, less supply plus rising demand equals higher prices.
The hipsters being priced out of their own neighborhood have a legitimate complaint. But instead of blaming the people who can afford the rents at CastleBraid, they would do better to blame the insane market distortions that make rent in this city higher than it ought to be.